As part of its earnings call, Microsoft today announced a number of new data points for GitHub, the massively popular code repository service it acquired for $7.5 billion in 2018. According to Microsoft, GitHub now has an annual recurring revenue of $1 billion, up from a reported $200 to $300 million at the time of the acquisition.
The company also announced that the service now has over 90 million active users on the platform, up from 28 million when the acquisition closed and 73 million last November, when Thomas Dohmke replaced Nat Friedman as the service’s CEO.
This marks the first time Microsoft has shared any financial data about the service the acquisition closed.
“Since our acquisition, GitHub is now at $1 billion annual recurring revenue and GitHub’s developer-first ethos has never been stronger,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in today’s earnings call. “More than 90 million people now use the service to build software for any cloud, on any platform — up three times.”
For the most part, Microsoft let GitHub be GitHub since the acquisition closed. Early on, a lot of developers — and especially open source advocates — worried that Microsoft would change the way the service operated and reduce its free offerings in order to squeeze more money out of it. But instead, GitHub expanded its free service and has continued to embrace open source and open source developers. Meanwhile, projects like GitHub Copilot probably wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Microsoft. And while some users defected to GitLab and other services, the new users numbers speak for themselves.
